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CHARNUS |
- 5TH FEBRUARY 2021
Originally written for submission to a book collection competition.
Once acclaimed as one of his generation’s greatest writers and the prophet of the 1960s sexual revolution, Lawrence Durrell appears almost forgotten by readers and critics today. I first came across Durrell in my teenage years as the pretentious and outspoken elder brother in the sunny 1980s adaption of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, introduced to me by my mother. Intrigued by her mention of Lawrence’s scandalous Black Book, internet research showed that the aspiring young writer of Gerald’s memory did, indeed, live to enjoy a successful literary career. However, had I not found a copy of his magnum opus, The Alexandria Quartet, while perusing an Exeter second-hand bookshop, I may never have pursued this author further.
I soon became absorbed by the book despite its intimidating length and lexicon. My adolescent mind was beguiled by the vast array of characters, its reference to adult themes of sex, literature and culture and Durrell’s idea of relativity and “a word continuum” underpinning the text. The city of Alexandria, as the “character” uniting the four novels divided by time and perspective, was, however, what fascinated me above all about the Quartet. Once I finished reading the four books, with much help from my dictionary, I still wanted to learn more about the fascinating writer and his influences. I resolved to start what would become a book collection devoted to him and his enigmatic muse: the Mediterranean.
A modern reprint of Prospero’s Cell was the first work I added as it provided Lawrence’s perspectives on his family’s time in 1930s’ Corfu also described in Gerald’s My Family. I learned from Lawrence’s text that the truth of his brother’s work was relative, however, and dependent on the muddled recollections and personal intentions of its creator, just like each of the perspectives presented in the Quartet. Moreover, I encountered references to his relationship with Henry Miller for the first time and found an ageing copy of his version of events in Greece, Colossus of Maroussi, adding yet another layer to this twentieth-century palimpsest. Prospero’s Cell, however, was, evidently, not written by a fully matured author and so my collection grew in search of him and his perspectives on the other locales and milieus of the Mediterranean. After further browsing in second-hand bookshops, I also realised that, due to the popularity of his books in the 1960s and their relative unpopularity today, early editions were fairly easy to come by cheaply. Further, I admired and came to love the vintage Faber designs evocative of the warmth and exoticism of the Mediterranean as perceived in mid-twentieth century Britain and how these conceptions and designs were changed by time and different publishers.
My main field of interest was, and is, history though and, increasingly, the history of the Middle East as I looked for a new area to research away from the European focus of the school curriculum. Preparing for my degree, I expanded my research and read Edward Said’s Orientalism, almost a pre-requisite for entry to my choice of university, SOAS. Though aware that the Quartet’s characters express views now seen as racist, I was unaware that its writer was also part of a literary tradition that “othered” the Middle East as, at once, inferior, stagnant and intoxicating. Therefore, I started a new section of my expanding Durrell collection focusing on alternative perspectives of Egypt, juxtaposed by the Quartet’s main narrator, Darley, with Italy, or the “right” side of the Mediterranean. Browsing bookshops and the internet had acquainted me with modern, Arabic-speaking Egypt’s most famous writer, Naguib Mahfouz. As a result, I started his Cairo Trilogy and bought copies of the first two parts. They illuminated the lives of the people featured merely as a shadowy and homogenous mass in the backstreets of Durrell’s Alexandria.
However, upon re-reading the Quartet and interviews with Durrell surrounding its inception, I also realised that, while certainly Orientalist, his presentation of the city he both loved and hated was also intentionally fictional. Indeed, he admitted that it was a literary creation attempting to resurrect an earlier Alexandria vanished by the time of his sojourn there during the Second World War. I learned from Ian MacNiven’s biography of Durrell that the culture of his city was largely based on the work of another English writer residing in Alexandria during another war: E.M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide written after his time on this historic piece of the Mediterranean during the First World War. I was astonished that a writer seemingly so English and Edwardian, known to me first through the charming Merchant-Ivory adaptions of his novels, could have influenced Durrell so much. Forster’s Guide has never been printed in great numbers, however, and so another literary quest was begun. Unperturbed, I set off to Piccadilly and found a rare recent edition. I soon realised how profoundly the book had influenced Durrell and that I had underestimated Forster who clearly could write about subjects other than 1900s middle-class families in the Home Counties. Indeed, the tanned, smiling and shirt-sleeved young man I encountered on the cover of my edition was not the ancient Cambridge scholar in tweeds that I had glimpsed before in stock photographs. A new part of my collection had begun. Before this, however, I found a copy of the first English-language edition of the Black Book. The novel that had first fascinated me and started my interest was now part of my collection and, in both appearance and contents, was just as strange and outrageous as I had hoped.